Building A National Health Information Infrastructure
President Bush Sets a 10 Year Goal for Electronic Health Records
In April, President Bush established a national goal of assuring that most Americans have an electronic health record within 10 years. He also ordered the creation of a central office at the Department of Health and Human Services ("HHS"), the Office of National Health Information Coordination, to oversee this complex effort.
HHS is working aggressively to promote the use of technology to improve patient safety and to allow quick, reliable and secure access to information that promotes the best possible care across the health care system. In response to President Bush's direction, HHS created the new position of National Health Information Technology Coordinator. The coordinator's office will provide national leadership to support efforts across government and in the private sector to develop the standards and infrastructure to support more effective use of information technology to promote higher quality care and reduce health care costs.
A key part of this effort is developing a National Health Information Infrastructure which would permit a doctor or other health care provider to access an always-up-to-date electronic health record for a patient, regardless of when and where the patient receives care. This would not be a national database, but rather a set of standards and secure networks that would allow a doctor or hospital to immediately gather relevant information by computer network such as test results, x-rays and medical history. The information would be protected by stringent security and privacy standards. Local health information centers would keep indexes of where patients were treated and could gather the information quickly when needed.
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